Another scathing article from the redoubtable Heather Mac Donald hits the streets:
Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.
These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have “diversity” in their job titles or not.
So basically, women have taken over tertiary education, just as they did the primary- and secondary sectors.
Whatever.
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that when men see that the odds are being stacked against them, when the dice are similarly loaded, and when the playing field is tilted towards the other side, they shrug… and quit.
In times to come, men with degrees in the Humanities (like myself) will be a vanishing breed, and “education” will increasingly become irrelevant except to a few stubborn men (again, like myself) who will still pursue their education, except that they’ll do it outside the lofty and feminized academic institutions. Their education will still be relevant — perhaps even more so than the accreditation offered by the Academia Femina — and other men of similar persuasion will recognize their value even if the HR Department (another female-dominated institution) doesn’t.
Ask any software manager whether he’d prefer to hire a kid with a “Computer Sciences” degree over a kid who showed him in his job application letter a fix for a bug in his product, and he’ll just look at you strangely, or else laugh outright. (That’s actually how #2 Son got his current job about seven years ago, and he’s not the only one.)
Ask anyone hiring people for a semi-skilled technical position whether they’d prefer a candidate with a degree, or someone who’s been through an apprenticeship and has worked in the related field (e.g construction) for five years, and you’ll get pretty much the same reaction. I knew a man who was the general manager of a gold mine in South Africa who would absolutely refuse to hire anyone — even in finance or accounting — who had not actually worked for a few years at a mine (as a miner, electrician, machine operator, whatever). His own son became an apprentice electrician, then worked as a “sparkie” (at another mine), and only then got his diploma in order to get a job at his father’s head office, at age 35.
Increasingly, a college degree is being evaluated by employers not as a credential for a job, but as proof that the applicant has had the ability to put in the time and stick to it. The Son&Heir, for example, got his job at Global Megabank Inc. not because of his degree in Philosophy, but because he had over a decade of managerial experience and dealing with customers. This means that while companies may say “degree required”, what kind of degree is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
As universities and colleges are feminizing themselves, they will become increasingly irrelevant to society as a whole. And the reaction to that, from men, will just be a shrug.
